Langston Hughes' Jazz Poetry "Jazz Band in a Parisian Cabaret"

Poet Langston Hughes  was an early and fervent exponent of combining the music of Jazz and the lyrical expression of Blues with literary poetry.  Here he draws us a scene with various characters in it, each of them relating to the experience of live Jazz in differing ways.  I felt compelled to perform Hughes' poem with music that is related to the Jazz that is silently sounding in the imagined background of his page poem, and this is the result.  The Parlando Project combines various words (mostly literary poetry) with original music in differing styles. We've done over 850 of these combinations, and you can hear any of them and read our accounts of of our encounter with the poets and their words at our blog and archives located at frankhudson.org